Good Vibrations

Sarah Ruhl and “Finian’s Rainbow” score.

Bothered and bewildered: Benanti and Cerveris in “In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play.” Photograph by Max Vadukul.

In our pornographic age, it’s hard to imagine that there was a time when people were better acquainted with the continent of Africa than with their own bodies. Sarah Ruhl’s “In the Next Room or the Vibrator Play” (superbly directed by Les Waters, at the Lyceum) takes us back to the corseted, alabaster eighteen-eighties, in the early days of electricity, when the vibrator was used by physicians to enhance a form of genital massage, which had been practiced for centuries as a treatment for hysteria. The procedure was thought to provide a workout for the neglected womb; it resulted in a heavy-breathing rictus, sometimes accompanied by discharge, which led to a release of tension. (Back then, “the big O” was called a “hysterical paroxysm.”)

“In the Next Room” brings scintillating news of the politics of desire, scientific history, and sexual behavior. Part of the comedy of Ruhl’s play—her most commercial and her best to date—is her nonjudgmental attack on a sensational subject. Ruhl hides her impish intelligence behind a simple style, maintaining a droll, detached sense of wonder at both the sexual ignorance and the sexual discoveries of her characters. “I will tell you an amusing story,” the earnest Dr. Givings (Michael Cerveris) says, launching into a tale about Benjamin Franklin electrocuting a turkey, as he applies a vibrator to a “frigid” patient, Mrs. Daldry (the excellent Maria Dizzia), who writhes slowly under the sheets on his examination table. After a while, he asks, “Do you feel calmer?” “A little,” she gasps. (“She has a quiet paroxysm,” Ruhl’s stage directions read. “Now remember that these are the days before digital pornography. There is no cliché of how women are supposed to orgasm, no idea in their heads of how they are supposed to sound.”)

In a low-key but daring way, Ruhl has extended the geography of the comedy of manners. Sex is always complicated, therefore always funny; Ruhl, however, never laughs at her bewildered, repressed characters, who are either lumbered by frustrations that they can’t explain or reeling with a desire for which they have no words. This game of positive and negative charges, a sort of alternating current, is announced in the play’s first beat, when Dr. Givings’s sweetly scatterbrained wife, Catherine (the pert Laura Benanti), plays with an electric light to amuse her newborn daughter. “Straight from man’s imagination into our living room,” she says. “On, off, on, off, on—” The sexual, as well as the electric, current has been turned on, and a revolution in living is about to be wrought. “In the Next Room” gives “the body electric” a whole new meaning.

In Annie Smart’s handsome set, the doctor’s office—his “operating theatre”—is adjacent to his well-appointed living room: a sort of split screen of psychological realms. In the office, patients are carried from emotional distress to release. After a manual session with the doctor’s assistant, Annie (Wendy Rich Stetson), Mrs. Daldry finds herself calling out Annie’s name the next time around. Another patient, Leo Irving (Chandler Williams), a jilted artist who hasn’t been able to paint for almost a year, is treated to an interlude with a greased-up instrument called the Chattanooga Vibrator. All the patients reënter the living room beaming, energized, reborn. In this pre-Freudian moment, they are unaware that their habit of forgetting items of clothing at the doctor’s office—which they must later return to claim—reveals their attachment to the new erotic pleasure. At one point, the rejuvenated Mrs. Daldry, whose presenting symptoms included stiff fingers, is coaxed by Catherine to play the piano in the living room. “It’s hardly been used, you must play it,” Catherine burbles. “The poor thing is languishing without a human touch. It’s like a piece of dead wood without being played.” Catherine, it turns out, is speaking about herself.

While Dr. Givings is treating hysteria in his office, his benevolent inattentiveness is fuelling it at home. He can’t see the aggressiveness of his patriarchal passivity, but we can. On his first entrance, Dr. Givings, scuttling to his inner sanctum, walks past his wife without so much as a glance in her direction. In his second scene, he insists that she and the baby hide from a new client; they hunker down behind the piano until the patient is safely in the office. There is no place for Catherine in the house, or in her husband’s imagination. He literally and figuratively can’t take her in. When she confesses her guilt over not being able to breast-feed her baby properly—a wet nurse is needed—he, in one breath, both puts her down and dismisses her sense of maternal failure. “Your milk isn’t adequate,” he says. “I love you.” At another point, he insists, “We are healthy and happy, are we not?” Not. Because Catherine is attractive and dutiful, it takes us a while to realize that her chattering, her hostile faux pas, her acting out (she listens by the office door), and her appetite for vigorous exercise (“I walk walk walk no one can keep up with me not even Dr. Givings”) signal her hysterical dissatisfaction. When she begs her husband to “experiment” on her, he smugly dismisses her. “You are my blooming young wife without a hint of neurosis,” he says.

Denied her husband’s medical expertise, Catherine, with the help of Mrs. Daldry, who has become an aficionado of the vibrator, breaks into his locked office; the two women take matters into their own hands, so to speak. “In this day and age, all one has to know how to do is press a button or pull a switch. I’ll hold it for you,” Catherine says, amazed that the vibrator “looks like a farming tool.” Together, they embark on the appliance of science. “They look heavenwards,” the stage directions read at the end of Act I. “The steady hum of the vibrator. Transcendent music. A curtain falls.”

Once the erotic is unleashed, emotional anarchy is certain to follow. Ruhl’s playwriting is inspired; in the second act, she never falters as she puts her characters through the paces of passion with a special high-comic gravity and grace. Jealousies erupt; passes are clumsily made, kisses exchanged, faces slapped, hearts elated and dashed. At one crucial point, Dr. Givings relents and gives his wife a proper treatment. “No, kiss me now. Kiss me and hold the instrument there, just there at the same time,” she says, embracing him passionately. “This is what I feared,” Dr. Givings says, bridling. “In a sick woman, the device restores balance, but in a healthy woman it makes you excitable and perhaps even causes some perverse kind of onanism.” He gives her a polite kiss; she calls him “inadequate.” The standoff is resolved only at the finale, which feels—and almost sounds—Shakespearean. “What is it, then, this very particular way in which you love me? What color? What temperature?” Catherine says, trying to coax her husband’s timid heart out into the open. Dr. Givings responds in the only idiom he knows. He kisses his wife’s face and announces his feeling for each spot: “I bless thee: temporomandibular joint / I bless thee: buccal artery and nerve.”

The sense of longing that haunts the play—“Love me. Love me for your job,” Catherine pleads—is dispelled in its thrilling, poetic final image. The set, with all its bourgeois trappings, falls away, and the play moves from comedy of manners to vision: in a surreal and exquisite encounter, which plays as a “mad pilgrimage of the flesh,” to borrow Tennessee Williams’s phrase, Dr. Givings and his wife face each other in their snowy garden. Catherine undresses her husband. “She has never seen him naked before; she has only seen him under the covers,” the stage directions read. His skin glows in the moonlight; she lies on top of him. Together, in their coupling, they make a snow angel. All we can know of Heaven, Ruhl seems to be saying, is the joy we make for one another here on earth.

“Finian’s Rainbow” (in revival at the St. James, under the direction of Warren Carlyle) doesn’t have Ruhl’s narrative brilliance, but it has the lyrics of Yip Harburg and the music of Burton Lane, which are genius enough. The 1947 show was the first full-fledged attempt to marry the African-American folk-musical traditions (gospel, blues) with Broadway panache; the Heaven it sings of is Broadway abundance, but with a distinctive progressive twist and an overlay of social justice. Harburg considered himself a “re-evolutionist”; his game was to mix the political and the playful. In songs like “Necessity” and “That Great Come-and-Get-It Day,” he celebrates change, not the status quo. In “When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich,” for instance, Harburg imagines the democratization of wealth and class:

When the idle poor become the idle rich

You’ll never know just who is who or who is which. . . .

No one will see the Irish or the Slav in you,

For when you’re on Park Avenue,

Cornelius and Mike . . .

Look alike.

“Finian’s Rainbow” is a testament to Harburg’s faith in the power of the imagination and of dreaming—“Follow the fellow that follows a dream,” one lyric advises. He believed that a new, liberal idea, when transmitted in song, could always “find a soft spot under a hard hat.” Glocca Morra, the name of Finian’s home town in Ireland (which Harburg made up), carries its own evocative utopian message. “I took two words from the German: Glück—luck; Morgen—tomorrow. Lucky Tomorrow,” he told me in the late seventies. “You like the word ‘Glocca Morra’ because, whether you know it or not, you connect it with Lucky Tomorrow. For the lyricist, there’s a great charm in writing things that get at you subliminally.”

The revival features John Lee Beatty’s beautiful burlap-and-floral patchwork curtain, well lit by Ken Billington, which sets the perfect mood for this American fantasia. The cast is led by the splendid Jim Norton, as Finian, who steals a pot of gold from a leprechaun in Ireland and wants to bury it near Fort Knox. That’s as much plot as you’ll get from me, but a tip of the cloth cap to the adapter, Arthur Perlman, and to the producers, David Richenthal and Jack Viertel, for bringing some clarity and crispness to the vexed book, by Fred Saidy and Harburg. Finian’s daughter, Sharon, is played by the fine-voiced Kate Baldwin, who gets to sing such standards as “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?,” “Look to the Rainbow,” and “Old Devil Moon.” “You and your glance / make this romance / too hot to handle,” she sings to the local hero, Woody Mahoney (the stiff Cheyenne Jackson). Unfortunately for Baldwin, there isn’t even a spark of heat between her and the good-looking Jackson. Their songs get across, but they don’t land with quite the power they deserve. On the issue of heat, however, Chuck Cooper, as the racist Senator Rawkins, who is turned black by the leprechaun’s spell, really cooks with “The Begat,” a gospel song about the origins of life:

They begat the Babbits of the bourgeoisie

Who begat the misbegotten G.O.P.

Harburg’s jokes and his musical feel evergreen. To judge by the lines on Forty-fourth Street, this production of “Finian’s Rainbow” will be around for a while, time enough for modern audiences to appreciate a musical master who was never properly in the public discussion in his lifetime. Even in this, Harburg was prescient. “Mozart died a pauper,” he quipped in a poem. “Homer begged for bread / Genius pays off handsomely / After you are dead.” ♦

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